The federal government wants to force the divorce of Live Nation and Ticketmaster more than a decade after it allowed the entertainment giants to merge.
“It is time to break it up,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday.
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The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon on Tuesday for allegedly using its power as a monopoly to illegally block competition and inflate prices.
“The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging,” the FTC said in an announcement about the complaint against Amazon.
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With persistent inflation and growing concerns over a recession, pundits, policymakers, and the president have expressed concern about an alleged lack of competition lurking in the dark corners of the U.S. economy. As President Biden himself said, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.” From Big Tech to baby food, both sides of the aisle are on the lookout for monopoly power. But sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.
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Google has offered to break apart in a bid to avoid greater punishment for antitrust violations from federal regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The tech giant has raised the prospect of separating a major business operation off from Google—the auctioning and placing of online advertisements—to form a separate entity also under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, people close to Google reportedly told the WSJ. It was unclear if the offer would satisfy the Department of Justice (DOJ), which declined to comment on the story, according to the WSJ.
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When the far-right website Infowars was banned by all the major tech platforms in 2018, mainstream media outlets didn’t come to the defense of founder Alex Jones, whom they described as a conspiracy theorist.
Two years later, the same outlets had a similar non-response when Big Tech imposed another media ban — this one on the New York Post, one of America’s oldest and most well-established newspapers.
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Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Democratic Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar unveiled a bipartisan bill Friday intended to restrict how major tech companies acquire and merge with smaller firms.
The bill, titled the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, is a companion to antitrust legislation advanced out of the House Judiciary Committee in June. If enacted, the law would shift the burden in antitrust cases to the acquiring party for mergers greater than $50 million, meaning that the acquiring firm would have to prove that its acquisition of another company was not anti-competitive.
The bill explicitly targets Big Tech companies, and it applies to firms with market capitalizations over $600 billion, at least 50,000,000 U.S.-based monthly active users or 100,000 monthly active business users. This would include Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple.
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Competition tends to bring about a better product or service, at a lower price, than does monopoly. This is a basic premise held by virtually all economists, disputed by pretty much no one in the profession. The entire antitrust edifice of the American system is built upon this foundational aspect of the dismal science.
And yet when push comes to shove, our society jettisons this insight, at least when it comes to assuring the quality of our food and drugs.
The Food and Drug Administration is a monopoly agency entrusted with this task. Its word is final concerning such matters. No competition is allowed. If a private agency set itself up as an alternative, it would first be subjected to raucous laughter, and then its creators jailed.
The FDA is a licensing agency. If it does not approve of a food or drug, it is illegal to offer it for sale. What is the non-monopolistic alternative to this sad state of affairs? This is called certification. How, pray tell, does this work? It is simple. Different firms set themselves up as evaluators of the quality of food and drugs, and each of them subjects these products to their examinations. They certify some as approved, and list others as not approved.
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At first blush, it may not seem that the Democrats’ $4.5 trillion infrastructure and spending plans and President Joe Biden’s bungled exit from Afghanistan have a nexus. But they do in China’s rare metals monopoly.
Beijing already dominates the rare metals market needed for electronics, electric car batteries and computers, a reality made more painfully obvious with the current computer chip shortage that is slowing production of new U.S. cars.
And now with the haphazard U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, one of the world’s largest untapped deposits of lithium — estimated by some at $1 trillion in Afghanistan — is poised to fall into China’s hands just as Biden has ordered that half all U.S. cars be electric by 2030 and congressional Democrats prepare to vote to invest tens of billions of dollars more to push that goal further.
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The U.S. government amended its antitrust complaint against Facebook on Thursday, bolstering allegations that the tech company illegally maintained a monopoly.
The amended complaint follows the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) dismissed December 2020 complaint which failed to adequately prove the tech giant’s monopoly in the “Personal Social Networking Services” market.
The FTC alleges that Facebook illegally acquired competitors WhatsApp and Instagram in order to stifle competition, maintaining monopoly power by preventing competitors from operating on Facebook software.
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